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Darfur: The Violence of Geopolitics

In recent years, the Darfur conflict experienced unprecedented global media coverage that focused on the dramatization of the conflict instead of a serious analysis of its root causes, which are underdevelopment, unequal distribution of wealth, and undemocratic policies. In that context, Darfur’s conflict illustrates another proof of the violent ideology of the state and its elite’s approach in regard to issues of political participation and equal development. In particular, the Sudanese people in the peripheries have witnessed policies of marginalization and exclusion for the last five decades. For most Sudanese, historically, the state is violent and oppressive entity, and all regions of Sudan have suffered from the state brutality. Moreover, Darfur’s conflict presents the failure of the elite and their nation‐state model in the Sudan. The state not only failed to contain the root causes of the conflict, which are marginalization and oppression of the socioeconomic and political rights of the Darfuri people and exclude their region form equitable development, but also had perpetuated these injustices.

The formation of the state in Sudan has always been a problematic task for the colonial rulers and the Sudanese elite alike. Not only had manipulated and oppressed its ethnic complexity (colonizers) but they undermined the necessity of creating the appropriate institutions (elite) that reflect societal needs. The framework that the colonial powers, from the Turco‐Egyptian Condominium to Colonial Britain, implemented in the making of the modern Sudanese state was deemed to be a great failure due to its alienated ideology from the existing realities of the Sudan.